Exotic Fruits

Since Dave posted about our encounter with the roadside ginup man, I thought it was a good time to post about some of the other tropical fruits we've gotten to taste recently. On Kevin's first day on the islands, we stopped at two different roadside stands to get some fruit. I have been wanting to taste a sugar apple for quite some time now, but had never seen them for sale until about ten days ago. As we were driving up the road, we saw a guy standing behind a table with some fruits on it, including a sugar apple! We stopped and ended up buying three sugar apples, some passionfruit, a guava, and a soursop. Later that day we bought some ginups and sea grapes. This pictures shows a big bowl of ginups, some purple sea grapes to the right of the sugar apple. The round green fruit is a soursop and the yellow-green items are passionfruit.


The sugar apples were very, very ripe. When Dave tried to wash one, it fell apart in his hands. It has a bunch of little pieces on the outside of it that make the whole sugar apple look similar to an artichoke. Since ours was so ripe, we basically just pulled it apart and grabbed portions with our fingers to eat. It's mildly sweet and very soft, almost custard-like. There are dark hard seeds in it that we spit out. We liked the fruit a lot. Kevin and I got to eat most of it because Dave was busy taking pictures! In the V.I. you can taste sugar apple flavored snow cones and sugar apple ice cream. As you can see, the inside doesn't look too appealing, but it was tasty!


Ginups are probably the easiest of these fruits to get. They are sold on the side of a few roads and they also grow on lots of trees all over the place, though the sellers usually get to those ginups first. To eat a ginup, you bite gently into the outer green peel/shell. If the ginup is perfectly ripe, the peel will crack open so you can suck the fruit out of the shell. Then you chew/suck the fruit until all that is left is the seed. If the ginup isn't ripe enough, it takes a lot of effort to get all the meat off the seed. If it's too ripe, it'll squirt lots of juice out when you bite into it and it won't crack open very well. I really think this website demonstrates the eating process best. A few more photos are on our shutterfly account.